A two-year experiment to abandon small change in northwestern Germany has been deemed unsuccessful
As "Russkaya Germaniya" notes, Kleve is located near the Dutch border. And in neighboring Netherlands, such rounding has been carried out since autumn 2004, is considered common practice, and over the years has not led to price increases or any technical problems. From the point of view of KCN businessmen, abandoning the smallest change would benefit everyone – buyers, trade, banks: small change is expensive, mainly for entrepreneurs and financial institutions, the effort of dealing with it is disproportionate to the face value of the coins.
The Association of Dutch Retail Chains claims that rounding prices saves its members up to 30 million euros annually. Not only neighboring Netherlands but also a number of other European countries intend to abandon small change. Italy has announced plans to stop minting 1- and 2-cent coins, and Finland, Ireland, and more recently Belgium have introduced rounding programs based on voluntary participation.
In Germany, however, the initiative did not find a large number of supporters – at least among the pioneers in the same city of Kleve. "The project is frozen," explains one of its ideological inspirers, Klaus Fischer from KCN. "Most local stores have returned to the old practice." And the buyers themselves were in no hurry to abandon the "unnecessary ballast in the wallet," as representatives of Klever City-Netzwerk tried to call 1- and 2-cent coins.
Rounding did not occur on product labels, where the price most often ends in ",99", but at the cash register on the total purchase amount: amounts ending in 1, 2, 6, and 7 were rounded down, and those ending in 3, 4, 8, and 9 were rounded up. The software of cash registers has a preset function for automatic rounding of amounts to the required values; from a technical point of view, the process was not costly and justified itself – no additional expenses were required from the enterprise.
Nevertheless, not all cash registers were able to meet the new requirements, and many traders feared problems with the tax inspectorate due to a lack of small change in the proceeds. Moreover, consumers were in no hurry to support the initiative: buyers still paid with small change and stood at the cash registers waiting for change – down to the last cent.
A study by the Rhein-Waal University also caused a stir, according to which rounding was more often not in the client's favor, and on average, on each such transaction, he lost 0.71 cents. Over time, the signs with the inscription "Dear customers, we round" gradually disappeared from the shop windows of Kleve, and discussions in other cities that planned to follow the example fizzled out.
Representatives of the German Federal Bank were cool towards the experiment in Kleve. Board member Karl-Ludwig Thiele called it a "marketing gimmick," and Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann has no doubt that "the German population wants to maintain the circulation of coins – including the smallest ones."